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Michael McFaul: Outrage as MSNBC guest says at least Hitler 'didn't kill ethnic Germans'

The former envoy was drawing a comparison between Hitler and Putin, saying that Russia's attack on Ukraine was killing ethnic Russians too

A former US ambassador to Russia has been blasted online for making false claims about Hitler while commenting on the Russia-Ukraine crisis during an apperance on MSNBC. Michael McFaul came on ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’ on Friday where he mentioned an "interesting" remark made by a Russian journalists on Ukrainian television about "how horrific" the war between Russia and Ukraine has been. 

The former US Ambassador to Russia and Stanford University professor citing the unknown commentator said: “One of the Russian journalists said, 'You know, there's one difference between Hitler when he was coming in and Putin. Hitler didn't kill ethnic Germans. He didn't kill German-speaking people.'”

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McFaul then said to fill-in host Ali Velshi: “I think people need to remember that we're talking about cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol and Kyiv, there are large populations there, you know, up to a third and sometimes as much to a half that are Russian speakers and are ethnic Russians. And yet Putin doesn't seem to care about that. He slaughters the very people he said he has come to liberate.”

McFaul's comments were shared on Twitter by Maddow Blog and in no time it went viral. The clip received more than one million views with lots of comments, mostly slamming McFaul. A person tweeted, “My German-speaking Jewish family over there would probably disagree, if they had survived.” The second one wrote: “The Nazis tested their drugs on disabled people—including "ethnic Germans" and "German-speaking people"—as they were planning their Final Solution. They literally slaughtered an entire generation of disabled people. So no, you're wrong.” “This is literally just straight up holocaust denial,” the third one added.

A tweet read, “During the occupation of Eastern Europe Nazis drove gas vans around. They’d kidnap people and kill them in the vans with pumped in CO2, dumping their bodies out to refill the vans in order to kill more people quickly. Have a fucking sense of proportion you lunatic. If your comparison ends in a place where you’re laundering Hitler’s reputation to swipe at modern Russia, I don’t care about the specifics of how you get there. So any pedants whining about the details of the comparison can fuck off.”

A user pointed out, “He did he targeted many ethnic germans ...jehovahs ..gay people ..students ...political dissidents..most of whom were ethnic germans ...most of the gay people in the camps were ethnic germans he DEFINITELY targeted the Weimar culture as an ideal which was german.” Another user said, “Hitler DID kill ethnic Germans or Arians. ANYbody he saw as sub-human & ANYbody who was of a different political opinion. My family were political dissidents & resistance fighters. Some were in concentration camps. 1 died there.”

A critic even went on to slam MSNBC by saying, “Seems like an opportune time to remind people that MSNBC isn’t actually a news channel. They’re entertainment. Their own lawyers admitted so in court while bailing out one of their hosts. (That’s how this goes, right?)” Another critic reamrked: “Hello Maddow, Hello McFaul, Germany here . . . ... I'm speechless and disappointed ! The German Jews are just as German as everyone else until the Nazis saw it differently…”